


These Days

by adnauseam



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Lie Low At Lupin's (Harry Potter), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 05:03:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18087953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adnauseam/pseuds/adnauseam
Summary: Oh well.





	These Days

 

Sirius was black and white and not much else. Just a skeleton. James would have said: looking a bit mangy there, mate. But of course, James wasn’t there.

So Sirius was black and white and not much else, skeletal, restless and laconic like he always had been, Remus thought, only worse. Sirius would turn to grin at him, sometimes, and it would be like old times, ancient, unearthed, only not quite because he looked like a fucking corpse, as Sirius would’ve said back in the day.

He wasn’t grinning now, that’s for sure. He stared out from atop the drystone wall and across the fields with no expression, blank, only not without emotion because even if his face had gone distant, his eyes were hollow, so hollow and gaunt, like they always were now.

Remus wanted to offer him a fag only he hadn’t smoked for years and only ever really had because Sirius did. Sirius had always wanted to pretend that he wasn’t the heir to the Black family fortune, which normally manifested in playing Muggle music and saying shite instead of shit, which was unconvincing, but had been endearing once. And then of course he wasn’t the heir to the Black family fortune anymore.

Remus thought about offering him tea but didn’t. He looked away instead. A pheasant was sauntering across the field in the general direction of the copse where two months later it would be killed for not much reason at all with a gun very suddenly, by an old man with too much money and nothing else to do but construct some sort of virile bloodlust.

When Remus looked back Sirius was a dog. He had probably shifted without realising. He often did that. These days.

Remus had gone out to buy bread in the village the day before and Mrs Harold had said to him that she was glad he had a dog now. “We all need a bit of companionship,” she had said. “You’re so alone up there.”

He was but he hadn’t minded that much. James would have said— actually, he wasn’t sure what James would have said. Sirius wouldn’t’ve said anything; Sirius would have grinned in what he probably thought was a rakish fashion and kissed him on the jaw and kissed him on the shoulder and kissed his collar bone and kissed his stomach and bit the sharp of his hip but that was so long ago it was hard to be sure it had ever happened. Once upon a time.

No kissing these days. Sirius was huddled into himself and he was cracked at the lips just like he was cracked inside and there wasn’t any fixing of it even if Remus had the energy, which he didn’t.

So Remus stretched out and felt a pull in his stomach and a shudder in his toes like some dilapidated rocker crooning low under uncertain cords and didn’t move. He sat beside Sirius and watched the fields as a wood pigeon cooed and thought about making some tea.

At some point Sirius was human again, at least approximately, and was looking at him intently as if he had something to say, or something to demand or decree, more likely. But he said nothing. His skin was yellowing like old parchment or bad magic or the moon on especially vicious and sickly nights, waxy and wasting. He needed a haircut. He could do with another bath. He could do with all sorts of things, these days. Oh well.

 

 


End file.
